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J.R: Is to get the scope of work. If we’re going to be doing a building that’s going to be doing manufacturing instead warehousing then we’re probably going to have a larger power requirement. Warehousing basically has lights and small conveyor type loads but not a lot of heavy machine loads. So basically, the nature… you have to get a determination of what your customer is doing. From that point, the first step is going to be any of the underground work that needs to be done before the concrete is poured…

J.R: Rough-in for the main electrical conduit. Rough-in for machine locations if they’re heavy machines in the concrete. Most the time it will be overhead, but could be… most of the things done prior to concrete would be drains and/or water. Once those infrastructures are put in, plant restrooms, rough-ins for restrooms, rough-ins for the office restrooms, whatever… that’s got to be under the slab, before the concrete is poured.

J.R: Correct. From that point, once the building is constructed, then we’re going to go in and install whatever the main service electrical service for that building, whatever type gear that requires based on the nature of the building.

J.R: Electric, main entrance equipment, whether it’s got to be a 400amp panel board or a 4,000amp piece of switchgear with multiple disconnects.

Ken: What other equipment? Panel board, switchgear, disconnects, any others?

J.R: Motor control centers, lighting panels, that’s basically the basics for the main part of that. Then we’re going to facilitate the wiring from that main whatever out to where ever the power company’s location is, which means running conduit typically and pulling wires between the power company transformer and the main service of the building. From that point, we’re going to take the main service of the building and divide it up into little pieces for lighting circuits, machine circuits, HBAC equipment circuits, and run the conduit and the wire that’s involved in hooking all of those devices up. We are going to install the light fixtures at the specific locations necessary depending on the type of plant, what the plant does, the layout of the plant.

Ken: Give me a little bullet point of light fixtures, what are common kinds of commercial facility light fixtures you have experience with.

J.R: Yes. Today a lot, there is some emphasis on higher efficiency florescence is making a strong in road into the marketplace. T-5 type florescence lighting is making a bigger push into the industrial and commercial applications.

J.R: That’s the type of lamp and balance [NT1] system that’s a more efficient system.

Ken: This is actually a great way of demonstrating all of your services. Just by building this building, once we get that front door open we pretty much know everything you can do.

J.R: Basically from the HVAC side, whether it be with air rotation equipment, heating only air rotation with cooling, rooftops with heating and cooling. From the office standpoint, often times there’s zoning requirements so that the systems are zoned for different areas of the office so that Mable’s not too hot when John’s too cold. We do a lot of zoning work both commercially and residentially that is a big part of the world today in what we do that’s a little different than just normal.

Ken: Tell me a little bit about your differential advantage in providing those zoning… obviously that’s important in growing and you have the expertise in that… what do you know about that, that others might not know?

J.R: I think that our number one objective in all cases is to make sure that the facilities that we are working in are from the HVAC perspective… they become seamless with building… you don’t know that it’s there because it’s where its supposed to be. No one cares about their heating and cooling systems until they don’t work. And our goal is to provide efficiency and comfort as well as functionality. You can make something work, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be comfortable.

Ken: Tell me a little about the tricks of the trade or not necessarily the tricks of the trade, but the things you consider when creating zones in terms of regulating the temperatures within each zone. What are the factors… walls, windows…

J.R: Factors are exterior walls, rooms that are adjacent to exterior walls, compared to rooms that are internal. In the last 10-15 years computer rooms are becoming more… nobody ever thought about the proper way to condition a computer rooms before, we typically even if it’s just an option, we always offer separate, totally separate equipment for a computer room because its virtually, its not impossible, but its really tough to make a computer room work off of a system that is doing anything else.

Ken: Just as a side-line, Google is building these data-processing centers, secret processing centers that are just these long warehouse-type buildings, but they have these cooling centers attached to the side of them that are like 4 stories high just for the separate cooling system for each building, just mammoth. They look like the kind of cooling systems that would heat an 80 story office building just for these football field size 2-story building, maybe even 1-story.

Ken: Oh, it is a big place, but you take a 80-story office building is 10 times as big as that.

J.R: Like I said in a lot of cases, very honestly, we started differentiating computer rooms before some of the general contractors would listen because our assumption is, if we give you the answers and you don’t want to take them, that’s fine, but at least we told you. So when you come back in 6 months and its not working like we told you it wouldn’t work, then at least we told you what you needed to do, so now you know what you need to do to make it right..

Ken: What general tips would you offer homeowners about home comfort and how to keep cool in the summer and warm in the winter? Anything you might not be able to find by just typing that into a search engine, there’s a lot of general information, insulation, etc. etc. any unique approaches you take in determining to best provide that home comfort? That utilizes your commercial side knowledge and expertise that you might use on the smaller side.

J.R: I think from a comfort standpoint I think that the zoning aspect… for true comfort, if you have any house of any size, I don’t care where it is, who built it or what it is, if you have a house of any size and you’ve got more than one floor, one piece of equipment it not going to keep you comfortable everywhere. It changes by morning to afternoon, wind blowing in a different direction; all sorts of things change the needs for different parts of the house.

Ken: Tell me some more of those. Give me more of a laundry list about the conditions you’re going to consider as you walk through a property to make your final determination.

J.R: We’re not going to focus on keeping the bathroom exactly the temperature, as we are going to focus on where you’re going to sit when you’re watching television or where you’re going to read the paper, where you’re going to spend the most of your time. That’s the issue, there are so many rooms in the house, but there’s a few that we spend most of our time in, some rooms we never go in, hardly. Not that they don’t want to be comfortable, but the primary areas… I’m not going to put a thermostat in a room that you’re never going to go in, if you’re always going to be in this room. If it’s any kind size of a house, I’m going to make sure the master bedroom is comfortable, the master bedroom probably the most important people are going to sleep in that room in this structure, so they’re going to be comfortable. Typically from a standpoint also, in a lot of cases we can, we may be able to even effect [NT2] the size the equipment by zoning, not totally but in some cases if you’re going to zone… there’s not very many times that you occupy all the house at the same time, there’s quarters you sleep in, there’s quarters you live in at different times during the day, so a little bit of balancing of that. And we have to look at the worst case scenarios and give you the real world scenario. But for the most part the people we’re talking about don’t work night shifts, so there’s not usually an issue. When people occupy the bedroom part of the house one time of day and they occupy the living quarters another time of day. The other side of that point is to that the occupied times of the day have a little bit different conditions, sun exposure and things like that, morning, evening, nighttime, darkness, bedrooms, daytime over here.

J.R: Sunlight, just sun up sun down. And obviously if you’re one of those people, and I would recommend if you want a clear [NT3] house, don’t turn your air conditioner on a at noon when it’s 85 and expect it to cool down immediately because it’s not going to. It’s going to be warm enough that you’re going to run the cooling, make sure you turn it on a nighttime. It uses less energy to run at nighttime than it does during the daytime, it’s not fighting mother nature, those sort of things, common sense sort of things, which is harder to get people to do now days than 20 years ago when nobody was used to cooling… open their windows as soon as the sun went down and wondered why it wouldn’t cool off when they closed them at noon and turned the air conditioner on.

J.R: It’s 90% humidity and you wonder why it doesn’t cool off immediately.

J.R: It has to be de-humidify before it can cool. We also care about indoor air quality too.

J.R: Air cleaners, now days we have our options of UV lighting for air quality control, electronic air cleaners, humidification.

Ken: Now these are areas we haven’t talked about. Humidification and UV lighting, are these specialties that you bring to the job that most people don’t consider?

J.R: I don’t know. Most people don’t… UV lighting probably not something that as many for air filtration I don’t think that we’re purification not filtration[NT4] . I don’t think there’s as many people… I mean I don’t think that’s as widely done as humidification. Humidification has been around for a long time.

Ken: Well lets talk first about the UV lighting, advantages, disadvantages, costs, etc.

J.R: Advantages are those for anybody who has any kind of allergy, airborne particle allergy conditions. UV lighting is a source to help alleviate, we’re not going to fix those conditions but we’re going to make the area that you… when you’re in your house, the area you breathe is going to be better, the house you live in is going to be better for your conditions. If you smoke I can’t necessarily guarantee that I’m going to fix all those either. There’s a lot of people who have those conditions if they smoke but at the same time. I know because I have children who have allergies and I know they work.

Ken: This is the first time I’ve heard a relationship between UV lighting and the air quality.

J.R: Oh, I can’t believe you don’t.... There’s a lot of talk… I mean they use UV lighting at hospitals forever, for killing bacteria and germs or whatever. It’s been available in residential/commercial market probably for 7-8 years, from that standpoint.

Ken: So if someone is sensitive to the quality of the air that they breathe in addition to typical air purification systems, you have additional solutions you can provide them to create an overall better environment?

J.R: Yes, I think what we’ll help with… and talk to you about your needs… I mean it’s not for everybody but, its far better, in my opinion its better than an electronic air cleaner, its less maintenance than an electronic air cleaner.

Ken: Is there a combination of electronic air cleaners and UV lighting that you can provide that would be optimal conditions?

J.R:: Yes, and you got to take a look at other things, you have to take a little bit of a look at the house in general, the duct work and things like that, but there’s no doubt in my mind that UV helps regardless of what that is.

Ken: So in other words we could go out there and do a little research out there about that subject, the relationship of air purification, UV lighting as far as better respiratory environments…

Ken: Well obviously your background in hospitals has contributed to your knowledge and understanding…

J.R: Not necessarily that, honestly, but there are commercial products out there that address a lot of different issues with UV lighting.

J.R: Well we have a couple or three bars we have done that use UV for smoke, that’s part of their smoke eater situation… in combination with ventilation… you can’t do it all that way, you got to have ventilation.

J.R:: A really bad one we did was a service club, I don’t remember a Knights of Columbus or what it is… the room they play BINGO in.

J.R: Yeah, as long as they operate it like its supposed to be and service it like it’s supposed to be. I don’t know why… if anybody ever had to service equipment like air cleaners and things in smoking areas, why anybody would ever smoke is beyond me. There’s nothing nastier than that.

Ken: So for a restaurant looking for somebody to service their filters on a regular basis, you could provide that? See I didn’t know that.

J.R: For an example, That’s not really hard, there’s nothing worse than that. We can do a commercial… let’s say for example I tried to do it down here… we had two schools in the county that had issues with air quality issues. Our high school, Shelbyville High School had… not the bird flu, bird droppings cause it, I can’t remember the name right now, you know what I’m talking about, causes respiratory… they had an issue with that. We actually can partner with the company that makes the equipment. They can do a one on one case for your needs, and basically no one eveer called them back and asked them to in either case, but our school had mold problems. What UV does basically it’s not necessarily the cure-all for mold, but what UV does is kill the particles in the air that the mold feeds off of, therefore you kill the food source.

J.R: They offer a full line from residential, from portable all the way to commercial.

Ken: This is a whole other area that you’re doing that could be a whole business to itself in terms of a nitch specialty. This is very interesting, especially because its somewhat new to me and I don’t often come across totally new topics. Well that’s cool. And humidification of course is a whole portion of the respiratory and breathing environment. Are there other issues of humidification in terms of plant production, efficiency or stuff like that, that you have had to deal with? Large scale…

J.R:: Well, there’s always issues with humidity both spectrums, being too high or too low.

Ken: Any industries that have particular effects you have experience helping regulate that issue?

J.R: Not specifically, other than testing laboratories, some testing units in some different plants where they have to have a controlled environment.

J.R:: Yeah, that’s not as big of a deal as it used to be. Used to be computer rooms, it was a bigger deal than it is now, still not necessarily non-existent deal, but usually most buildings are conditioned enough that its not an issue.

Ken: Well I just read… saw a headline, I didn’t read the article. It was about some chip operating in much higher speeds at 368 degrees below zero. So there’s a new area of chilling that will be the focus of somebody in the near future. Keep your Dell down below the 300 mark.

J.R: Oh, my. Now all they have to do is figure out how to keep it running… ambient and it’ll be fine.

Ken: Commercial refrigeration I see pops off the page at me. Restaurants we just talked about. Restaurants being a kind of industry that you have all the particulars needed to help them turnkey from refrigeration, air quality, and all the other electrical, plumbing and AC things.

[NT1]4:23

[NT2]1:22

[NT3]2:37

[NT4]4:55

Cooling Subhead Number Two

J.R: Electric, main entrance equipment, whether it’s got to be a 400amp panel board or a 4,000amp piece of switchgear with multiple disconnects.

Ken: What other equipment? Panel board, switchgear, disconnects, any others?

Ken:: Give me a little bullet point of light fixtures, what are common kinds of commercial facility light fixtures you have experience with.

J.R:: Yes. Today a lot, there is some emphasis on higher efficiency florescence is making a strong in road into the marketplace. T-5 type florescence lighting is making a bigger push into the industrial and commercial applications.